Following the precedent of the pen-and-paper analogues that preceded them, emails, instant messages (IMs), text messages, and other electronic messages often are composed with a salutation or greeting that includes the name of one or more of the intended recipients of the electronic message. However, this gives rise to situations whereby the message composer inadvertently misspells a recipient's name in the greeting or elsewhere in the message body. Such errors are particularly common when the recipient's name is uncommon in the culture of the sender or where the name is spelled similarly to a common non-name word. Conventional error detection mechanisms, such as spell-check processes that use a predefined general dictionary, often fail to catch such situations. To illustrate, the recipient's name may be similar in spelling to a common word and the sender may unconsciously spell the recipient's name as the common word, which then would cause the misspelling to go undetected as it matches a spelling found in the spell-check dictionary. Additionally, even when the recipient's name is spelled correctly by the sender, the auto-correct feature in some messaging applications change the name to match a word found in the spell-check dictionary. Such incidents can cause embarrassment or confusion for the sender and the recipient.